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‘Montana, Warts and All’ a clear-eyed look at state

From Browning to Fallujah, Iraq, Jonas Rides At The Door carried a medicine bundle from a culture that helped heal him at his return.

“Better to die young at war than grow old,” an old Blackfeet proverb says. After outliving five friends, Rides At The Door believed that. “He thought his own survival somehow implicated him in the death of his friends,” Daniel Person wrote in an account of the veteran’s recovery.

“His transformation from blackout drinker to a voice for combat veterans cannot be tied to any one thing. There was certainly some luck involved, and a lot of growing up. But Rides At The Door also credits traditional Blackfeet warrior ceremonies, ancient songs and dances and sweat lodge rituals. And he found Blackfeet mentors who encouraged him to pursue higher education as a way to both process his own experiences and to help others around him,” Person wrote.

Rides At The Door’s story is among those included in a new book featuring the best writing from a decade of the Montana Quarterly magazine.

In “Montana, Warts and All,” Montana Quarterly editor Scott McMillion wrote that the magazine is a clear-eyed look at Montana.

“While we’re all proud and lucky to live in a place as big and open and welcoming as Montana, we try to keep our eyes clear. This isn’t Shangri-La. Things aren’t perfect and never will be. Warts are common. Some people are criminals, or greedy, or just bad neighbors,” he wrote. “But I think they’re overshadowed by the ‘and all,’ people who get up every morning and do their job, who help, who wouldn’t dream of leaving somebody stuck in a ditch, who share the Quarterly’s focus on finding ways to keep from screwing it up.”

In addition to a section of fiction, the book includes stories of interesting people, experiences and places, stories of Montana by Montanans.

McMillion wrote of a night looking for black-footed ferrets in the UL Bend with a federal biologist slogging to keep the species from extinction.

A bittersweet float down the Yellowstone River, from the national park boundary to the river’s confluence with the Missouri, with his family made for a story by Alan Kesselheim. It’s the river where he hopes to have his ashes scattered. It’s a river bordered by spectacular scenery and highways, sucked for irrigation and polluted.

“The first time down the Yellowstone I kept waiting for the river to lose its appeal, for it to get boring. It never happened. The land changes, opens, shades into the pastels of the badlands. The sky widens. Rattlesnakes swim the river. Cottonwood bottoms spread for miles,” he wrote. “If anything, the valley becomes more evocative.”

Shannen Rossmiller sits for a photograph in 2007 in Helena. Rossmiller, a 38-year-old former Miss Congeniality from Conrad, is perhaps America’s most unlikely spy. Her story is among those featured in “Montana, Warts and All.”(Photo: AP Photo/Eliza Wiley)

“Most days she ran on adrenaline and the deeply anchored motives that pushed her to continue even as conventional wisdom told her to stop. And occasionally, as her new life absorbed more of her time and thoughts, she would find a quiet place to think about an old life that was slipping away, and cry,” Welsch wrote.

He caught up with her in the Ruby Valley after the publication of her 2011 book, “The Unexpected Patriot.”

She harkens back to riding in a combine with her father in northern Montana, a childhood preference for reading about the macabre and an early gift for languages, of patriotism, Christian conservative values, abiding affection for Islam and dreams about visiting or even living in Lahore, Pakistan, a cultural hub.

“Rossmiller sometimes wonders if she’ll ever shake the ghosts of choices she’s made,” Welsch wrote. “She will, she is certain, always be in Montana, where on a September day in 2001, one life ended and another began.”

Craig Lancaster wrote of traveling to the Fairfield Bench to see the farm where his dad’s childhood was stole from him.

“The place was tiny, and my heart ached all over again for Dad,” he wrote. “With a stepfather and a mother and two siblings sharing that small space, he had nowhere to escape and nothing that could truly belong only to him. ... I watched Dad, and I tried to imagine what this place must have seemed like to the child he once was, stuck under the thumb of a brutal stepfather. I hoped he might find the words, sitting there and looking at it all through the lens of half a century, but those thoughts remained his alone.”

Myers Reece, too, wrote about his father, a Livingston artist and a finger painter of surreal scenes.

“With artists, we seek context. With Parks Reece, it’s hard to find. By nature, his art seems to exist in a world that is out of context. Fish smoking cigarettes. Ranchers shaking hands with wolves. Flying buffalo,” Reece wrote.

“Before you can understand Parks Reece the artist, you must try to understand Parks Reece the man,” he continued. “I have spent my life observing this phenomenon, taking mental notes, like a diligent behavioral anthropologist. He too fancies himself as somewhat of an anthropologist, as he often compares the miracle of my birth to the arrival of a pet monkey into the house.”